


The Zoo of Toronto

by Bellsastuff



Category: Hockey RPF, Zoo City - Lauren Beukes
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Kinda Daemons, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-08-14 02:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7995808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bellsastuff/pseuds/Bellsastuff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one missed it when a massive porcupine had shuffled in between the reporters with a single minded focus, pushing media away until it was able to grip onto Phil’s suit pants and try to pull itself up.  He hadn’t been able to do more then besides pick the animal up before it could shred his pants to shreds and walk out of the locker room before the decision had been made with the Toronto media.</p><p>Phil Kessel was guilty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Zoo of Toronto

The wren appeared on Reimer’s crossbar as the buzzer sounded.  It was the first.  

 

No one noticed, not really.  Birds got into arenas sometimes, it happened.  But no one missed it when a massive porcupine had shuffled in between the reporters with a single minded focus, pushing media away until it was able to grip onto Phil’s suit pants and try to pull itself up.  He hadn’t been able to do more then besides pick the animal up before it could shred his pants to shreds and walk out of the locker room before the decision had been made with the Toronto media.

 

Phil Kessel was guilty.

 

Zoos didn’t happen unless you were guilty, after all.  In China, they were killed immediately.  If one of the strange spirit creatures same to you, then you surely did something to deserve it.  There was a reason that prisons all around the world were filled with them.  Men and women would pace in their cells, their steps followed closely by some kind of animal that simply appeared one day, a visual indication of having done wrong.  

 

Phil stopped being Phil Kessel, Leafs hope for the Stanley Cup.  He became Phil Kessel, the Zoo of Toronto.

 

The strange thing was that he didn’t mind, not really.  He went online once he got home and after checking Wikipedia for what porcupines needed, he ordered a food service to his summer home in Florida that could send the right kind of foliage and enough supplies to set up a habitat for it.  Stella was clearly baffled but after enough time barking at the strange shambling thing, she curled in Phil’s lap for comfort and swiftly stopped caring.  And the porcupine?

 

It shat neatly on his kitchen floor, climbed the cabinets and fell asleep on top of his refrigerator as though nothing was wrong.  With that done, the porcupine had been satisfied.  And with nothing else to do, so was Phil.

 

It, or as he would later learn, she, was a North American Porcupine.  He’d Googled her.  It seemed like the right thing to do.  She also ended up faring well in Florida for the summer, though the plane ride in a kennel beside Stella had left her squealing and needy, making it hard at times to give family hugs or contact of any type as they filtered in to give their regards.

 

His mother had cried.  His father ignored it.  Blake shrugged.  Amanda was fascinated and later confided that there were other hockey players that she’d heard of, women, who’d had a devastating loss and had an animal show up after.  She wouldn’t say who, saying it wasn’t her secret to tell.  The shameful feeling behind that left Phil cold.

 

The porcupine like popcorn.  She liked it alot.  He would throw a kernel across the floor when Stella was fast asleep and watch as the porcupine would shuffle along the floor, it’s gait awkward but determined.  She would almost pounce on the food, staring back at him with beady eyes until he threw another for her to catch.  He liked this little ritual.  He liked her.  He liked that he had her, honestly.  

 

No one else did.  

 

Reimer had been able to hide his bird in his glove hand as he left the rink and he and April had kept its existence quiet.  He’d reached out to Phil the next day and they’d spent nearly an hour discussing what it had all meant over the phone.  Bozie didn’t call to ask Phil about it.  Neither did Reems.  Phil understood that.

 

His agent lamented, “Why did it have to be a porcupine?  I could work with something sexier but they already think you’re pushing them away, this isn’t going to help.  The guilt part, the fact you felt that bad about losing, we can use that.  We can try.  But it’s going to be a hard sell, Phil.”

 

It wasn’t as though he really needed to be told.  Everyone knew that Zoos were people who had done something terrible, something they couldn’t forgive themselves for, even if no one really knew what the animal did besides the Zoos themselves.  McSorley would have been a Zoo, if the phenomena had happened then.  It only started around 2011, as much as he could tell, and the fact that Cooke didn’t have one after Savard left a sour taste in his mouth.  But that was the thing, no one really understood where they came from and how.  Just that if you had one, you’d done something to deserve it.

 

Phil figured it was the losing that did it.  He’d lost.  He’d had a beautiful year, a beautiful short sprint where he’d racked up goals like he’d been saving them up during the shortened lockout and against his former team, it had seemed destined.  They’d been up 4-1 and the city of Toronto had been a living thing, pulsing around the team.  This was finally their year to push away from being the perennial basement dwelling team and see the sunlight again.  But in a period, that hope was gone.  And so was the city.

 

He’d tried to leave the locker room as soon as he could.  He always did, no matter how much his teammates, new and old, laughed at him for it.  And especially now, he couldn’t bear to see their faces or hear Reimer and Dion apologize for having let the city down.  But the media had caught him, still sweaty with his thinning hair plastered to his head.  They crowded around him, asking questions in a staccato barrage of voices and panic gripped as his throat as a shadow dripped silkily from Feschuk’s shoulder and began to slide towards him.  More bloomed from the sunspots left from camera flashes, bouquets of dark oily sickness that squirmed towards him.  If they touched him, he couldn’t live.  He wasn’t sure how, but he knew that as certainly as he knew anything.  And he was afraid.

 

That was when the porcupine had trundled in from what seemed like nowhere.  It hissed at the shadows, banished them back to where they came from and when the porcupine started to climb onto Phil, he had the strangest knowledge that the act had been mindlessly benevolent.  It had chased away his demons for no other reason than it had been the right thing to do.  An entire city had been dropped into reality and let down by an overpaid team shackled by bad contracts and Phil had cost the Leafs three very good draft picks but the porcupine had only seen that there were shadows and that wasn’t right.

 

He loved her.  He couldn’t communicate with her and the 200 feet of a rink was tough with her on the bench, any further and it felt like he’d have a heart attack, but she had saved him, somehow.  Reporters would try to ask about her, somehow not realizing that a spirit creature who showed up despite all rules of thermodynamics was unexplainable and he’d end up unable to do much more than fumble his way to some kind of platitude about how he was just a regular guy who played hawkey, right?

 

* * *

 

Luongo stopped him in the ACC when the Panthers were in town, his grin wide and teeth impossibly white.  He’d slapped Phil on the back and said, “Let’s go out for a drink later, huh?  I know a place.”

 

Phil had wanted to object.  He almost did, until a massive centipede crawled up from Luongo’s collar started up the man’s cheek.  He’d shuddered, picturing the many legs across his skin but Lu had only grinned again.  “The Cup final.”  He said, voice softer this time.  “Happens to goalies usually.  We’re going out after the game.”

 

He didn’t argue after that.

 

The bar was quiet, despite the menagerie inside.  A squirrel stared at them from the bartender’s shoulder as the woman seated at the bar stroked the large wolf seated placidly beside her.  Everywhere, there were Zoos of all ages and races, connected only by the animals beside them that marked them all as ‘other’.

 

“It’s the guilt, I think.”  Lu said, his words coming out in a rushing sigh.  “Usually, it’s for things like killing someone, or causing a death, something like that.”

 

He leaned back into the red velour booth, his limbs long and languid as he watched his centipede worm its way back and forth across his hand.  “Guilt.  It’s a weird thing, yanno?  Evolution wise, it makes sense.  Keeps us grounded.  But too much of it, and it just eats at you.  Tears you apart bit by bit until you can’t really breathe and just want to die.  There’s all of this weight and expectation.  Goalies, that’s what we’ve always dealt with, especially now that we can really stop pucks and aren’t just kicking and pinwheeling.  A city lives and breathes on your shoulders and when you fall?”

 

Lu shook his head, moving his hand with a slow grace as he picked up his glass of gin and tonic and took a long drink, no worry for the centipede that took the opportunity to crawl from his hand onto his hair.  “You’re lucky your city didn’t riot.”  He set the glass down with a thud.  “Still.  I get it.  Biggest hockey city in the world, and you’re the star.  I’m surprised Dion didn’t get one too.”

 

That was the best explanation Phil had heard, so he accepted it.  There wasn’t much for it, he figured.  Not really.  He had a porcupine that had to be within 200 feet of him at all times and that would have to be that.  The city would forgive him eventually and he’d bring the Cup back to Toronto and all would be forgiven.  It was a hockey city, they would accept good hockey as an apology.

 

They didn’t.  He shouldn’t have been surprised, except that he was.  He’d picked four teams that he could be traded to without waiving his NTC, all hitting the cap or, in the case of the Bruins, never likely to ever take him back again.  And he was a Zoo, which made it even stranger that Pittsburgh had fought for the trade and somehow made room for him in their cap.  He was a Pittsburgh Penguin on July 2nd and Toronto was glad to see him leave.

 

* * *

 

The porcupine liked his new place.  She could climb into the trees in his backyard and eat free range bark and twigs instead of the kind delivered to his house daily.  Phil wasn’t necessarily sure that the stuff in his backyard was better for her, but she enjoyed it.  And he didn’t mind going to his backyard with a Broncos game on his phone and Stella able to run around freely, so he let her eat.  

 

Bones was probably the best with her.  He’d slip a piece of spinach from the premade meals sent with them on the plane and hold it out for her.  Whenever she’d balanced her front paws on his hand and start to munch, he’d hold in his breath, only exhaling when she was done.  “That’s so cool, man.”  He’d mutter to Phil before starting on Zatkoff about not shuffling the cards right because ‘don’t try to cheat man, you don’t have to hide that you gotta to beat us’.

 

No one seemed to mind her, really.  Plotnikov had viewed her with wide eyed suspicion but after what Phil figured was a one two punch from Geno and Gonchar, he’d relaxed enough.  Phil got that though.  He’d read on Wikipedia in one of his first internet binges about the right wing groups in Russia and what they thought of Zoos.  Sergei had likely only seen Phil’s kind on the news in a perfunctory story of a suspected suicide, only to have the story change to something else just as quickly.

 

Perron had been fine with her and a good guy to talk to and Phil had been sad to see him go.  But that was how hockey was, honestly.  You ended up playing against your friends in constant different ways in different uniforms and after a while, it stopped hurting.  You started to look forward to it because then you could say hi again and maybe catch a beer in some place where Zoos wouldn’t be stared at.  Someone’s house, probably.

 

Hagelin had been bleary eyed still when he trudged into the locker room with Hornquist, the mid day game against the Canes likely more than he’d wanted to handle.  When he almost stumbled over the porcupine, who had a bad habit of sitting on the logo and watching them, he’d given her a clipped apology and continued on as though she was as normal to an NHL locker room as stinking goalie gear.  “Hey.”  He’d said to Phil, holding out a hand as he found Perron’s old stall, now with Hagelin’s name and number in the placard as though Perron had never been in black and gold.

 

“Hey.”  Phil said, pausing from loosening his tie to shake his hand.  “Phil Kessel.  Good to meet you.”

 

“Carl.  Though I know who you are.”  He grinned.  “Who doesn’t?”

 

That was true, Phil thought.  He was known, or at least the part of him that squinted and fidgeted into the camera was known.  But the other better parts, those he hoarded for those who needed to know that part of him, those would still be unknown.  So he let them unspool from himself, picking up an easy, joking banter until the tense jitteriness in Carl from not enough sleep and too many nerves changed into eagerness to skate.  And they did.

 

It was like skating with Reems again, almost.  Reems was never this fast but he had better hands and when they had Bozie behind them, they could flank out like a current, a devastating one two punch.  With Carl, it was more fluid but just as devastating.  They could gel into something good and electric, he could feel it.

 

Geno went down and Cully moved between them and still, they connected.  Sully tried to move them with other wingers and centers but they always ended up back together on the ice.  When Bones was moved to their center and they were given the greenlight to score, they did.  It was fluid, easy.  Bones or a defenseman would flick the puck down the ice and Carl would be in a foot race with the other team’s defenseman, a race he always won.  With a tight forecheck, he’d find Phil swooped towards the net and dish him the puck, which Phil could shoot or, depending on his hand and availability, pass back to whoever was open.  They worked and it was beautiful.

 

Phil loved him, he realized a month before the playoffs.  He rolled over in bed one morning to see Stella on the pillow next to him and the porcupine on her stand near the bed and he knew.  He loved Carl.  He rolled back over and went to sleep.

 

It wasn’t that he didn’t find the idea interesting or likeable, he did.  He really did.  He’d have to be blind not to.  But Phil was a Zoo.  There were things he couldn’t have.  That was life.

 

* * *

  
Carl kissed him at their combination ‘end of the year/we’re going to the playoffs’ party.  It was in the bathroom, the porcupine trundling around the tiled room with no interest in the fact that Phil was melting against the wall with his winger pressed in tight against him and keeping him up.  “Why?”  He asked, when the immediate need had passed.

 

“I wanted to.”  Carl’s grin faltered a bit.  “Is that okay?”

 

“Yeah.”  He said quickly, catching himself as he said in a measured voice, trying to talk over the squealing, grunting sounds the porcupine was making,  “But.  I mean.  Her.  Me.  Ya know?”

 

His brows crinkled a bit.  “What, the porcupine?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Are you asking if I mind her?  Or why you?”

 

Phil felt a creeping of nerves go up his spine.  “Yeah, I guess.”

 

Carl’s forehead was sweaty as he tipped his head forward and let it press against Phil’s hairline.  “I like you.  That’s the best explanation I have.”

 

He gave a better one, but it was later.  A week and a half later, in fact, in the dark in Phil’s room with the moon hitting the porcupine’s quills.  “You never notice serial killers with animals.”  Carl said, face screwed up as he tried to find the words.

 

Phil stretched out on the bed, still feeling languid and warm.  “Some of them.”

 

“Just the sick ones though.  The ones who are really fucked up.  Not the sociopaths.  There was this guy, Anders Breivik.  He was Norwegian, blew up some bombs in Oslo then went to an island and killed a bunch of kids there for a summer camp in 2011, when the animals were starting to show up.  He still doesn’t have one.  It’s because he doesn’t care or have any remorse, at least that’s what they say.”  

 

Carl’s hand was gentle as he brushed what was left of Phil’s thinning hair, his voice feeling much the same.  “The animals come to the ones who feel remorse.  They come to the ones who need it, I think.  A friend from Michigan, she was in suicide watch and a bluebird came to her.  She didn’t even hurt anyone, just felt bad enough that it found her.  The porcupine, it just shows that you felt something really strong.  I don’t mind that.”

 

“You don’t think it’s a sign of my sins, or whatever?”  Phil asked, soft into the high ceiling of his bedroom.  

 

“You lost a hockey game.”  Carl murmured, hand still on Phil’s hair.  “If that’s a sin, then we’re both going to hell.”

 

That sin was one they didn’t face much in the next month.  The team was on fire, constantly battling back from the murmurs of media about how a team with a Zoo couldn’t win a Cup and, more commonly, how their blueline would be their downfall.  But it felt destined, like there was no way that this momentum couldn’t lead to something great.

 

Phil felt worn.  He was tired and his hand ached despite the ibuprofen he took like candy.  Others had it worse, of course.  Hornqvist’s legs were a riot of color and Bones had announced that he was going to start blocking shots with his chest, since that was the only place not not bruised up.  They’d all laughed at that idea until Cole took a blocked shot to the chest and the crucifix he wore bent and imbedded into his skin.  To his credit, Cole had been the one who laughed first, showing off his cross shaped bruise with the crow of “We’re blessed by God now, boys.”

 

Tampa had been a nail biter.  They actually had faced elimination and if it wasn’t for Rust, they might have.  But they did it, they pulled it off and in Phil’s delirious joy, he had the worst, or maybe best, interview with Pierre ever.  

 

“How’s your breath?”  “Uh, that bad, eh?”

 

It was all the media could talk about for a while.  Not the porcupine that was at his side, or whether he’d done something besides lose a game to deserve it.  Instead, everyone was laughing.  He liked it.  He liked it alot.

 

* * *

 

Seeing Reimer again had been good.  Great.  Amazing, really.  They’d finished last year in a bottom dwelling team and ended it in a Cup Final, which was beyond what either of them could have dreamed.  

 

“Weird that it’s not together.”  Reimer remarked over his can of Diet Coke as the woods around Phil’s house chirped and sung.  

 

“Right?”  Phil shrugged, his lawnchair cupping his battered body like a cradle.

 

“At least a Zoo will win.  I thought I might open up about that, if it’s me.  I think it’d be good for people, show we aren’t all monsters.”

 

Reimer’s face was earnest when Phil peeked over, his eyes startlingly blue and honest.  “Nah man, don’t.  Seriously, you don’t want that kind of attention and shit.  If I could hide her?”  He jutted his thumb up to where the porcupine was making her way up a tree.  “I would.”

 

Reimer followed his motion up as he studied the laborious climb, his own wren flitting back and forth on his lap.  “What’s her Gift?”  He asked after a moment of silence.  

 

“Gift?”

 

“Yeah.”  Reimer held his hand out for his wren who cheerfully hopped on.  “We can do this.”

 

A knocking sound thumped on the side of Phil’s head before the memory of the Kessel-Suter Christmas pond hockey game became as real as if it was just being made.  He could feel himself cursing Amanda as she blasted by him, hear Ryan’s hooting laugh as she neatly picked his pocket and was off.  He could almost taste the cold Wisconsin air on his tongue until it faded and the humidity of the Pennsylvania air rooted him back.

 

“Holy shit.”  It took him a while to gather himself, eyes shutting against the twilight.  “What was that.”

 

“I can bring back happy memories.  It’s nice, eh?  I hear some people have gifts that are way worse.  Can’t complain.”

 

Phil stared at Reimer for a moment more before he shook his head.  “We can’t do anything like that.  I don’t know man, she’s just a porcupine who hangs around.  She made the shadows go away but other than that, she hasn’t done shit.”

 

* * *

 

Carl was more interested in hearing about this conversation than Phil had been in having it.  “I thought you knew what she did.”  He said, a soft, unbelieving laugh coming through him.  “You don’t know?  Really?”

 

Phil grunted as the plane around them went through turbulence, grabbing onto the armrest as tightly as the porcupine gripped the seat cushion across the aisle.  “No.  She’s just an animal, right?  I dunno, maybe she’s different.  Maybe I’m different.  I didn’t really worry about it, I guess.”

 

“Have you ever looked at her when you’re in the locker room before a game?”  

 

Phil looked at Carl’s face, handsome despite the blonde scraggle on his chin that couldn’t really been called a beard.  “No?  She just does her own thing and I do mine.”

 

“Watch her.”  His voice was amused.  “You’ll see.”

 

So he did.  When they were getting ready, when everyone was filing in and not really talking as the nerves of Game Six made them jittery, she didn’t seem to do much.  So Phil started up with his usual banter, calling guys out and fucking with them a little until their shoulders relaxed and their faces eased.  That was when he heard it, a swish of quills tapped against the carpeted floor in rhythm with his voice.  

 

“She does that only before a game.”  Carl leaned in to say.  “And when she does, it gets easier.  I don’t know how, but all the-”  He gestured to his head.  “The noise and chatter, it melts away.  I love it.”

 

Phil stared down at her, her beady eyes back up at him as she waddled over to get up on her hind legs and place her clawed paws on his knee pad.  “Thanks.”  He whispered to her, finger delicately tracing the soft fur of her nose.

 

It felt different, after that.  When the buzzer had sounded and he’d screamed and hugged everyone in sight and pressed a quick kiss to Carl, he’d looked for her.  As she toddled eagerly onto the ice, he skated over and let her climb onto his arm, not minding her claws with his layers of hockey gear.  “We did it.”  He murmured, skating around the Shark Tank’s rink in a daze as people yelled and she excitedly sniffed at his ear.  “We did it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the INCREDIBLE book 'Zoo City' by Lauren Beukes. I highly, HIGHLY recommend it. I took some liberties, usually a Zoo only appears if you have killed someone and are facing that massive of a level of guilt, but I thought that for guys in the NHL... losing would probably feel that bad. In the book, having a Zoo makes you basically the lowest of the low, seen as someone who has sinned so badly that you have been cursed, despite the fact that the animals seem to have the best intentions towards their people. For Phil to have one and still play would be... not super likely, but. Oh well.
> 
> READ THE BOOK.
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr at @purekesseltrash. Also, fun fact, the bit about Cole's crucifix getting bent by a shot is true, poor goober. And if you want to fall into a youtube hole of watching porcupines, it's a good idea. Start here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGz8jcbJjRw
> 
> Also, Anders Breivik is a real and awful shithead of the alt right and not a made up character. He went to a summer camp for liberal kids/ teenagers on the island of Utoya (I don't know how to put the strike that should be through the o) on 07/22/11 after bombing Oslo as a distraction and murdered 69 people, 77 in total including the bombing. The Norwegian people acted pretty incredibly and picked them self from a terrible tragedy with incredible and uncommon grace, and my heart goes out to them.


End file.
